An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.
Conversational memoir of the author’s career in the FBI.
Moore is candid about his personal flaws and shortcomings, but most of the book is a love letter to a dangerous career and an agency filled with colleagues he admired. His assignments included counterterrorism, especially after 9/11; operator of a SWAT team that conducted surprise raids; sniper with the highest sharpshooter status; and pilot of FBI aircraft. Despite the dramatic-sounding assignments, Moore emphasizes that a career in the FBI does not involve around-the-clock adventuring; bureaucratic routine is part of the mix. Early in his career, he received a posting to the FBI office in Salt Lake City, an outpost where excitement and even normality sometimes seemed lacking. His first substantial assignment took Moore to rural Idaho, where he was keeping watch on members of a white-supremacist group known for violence. The author does not hide his mistakes due to inexperience and openly admits how fear nearly overcame him at certain moments. As he became more experienced, fear rarely entered his mind; he became an adrenaline junkie. Welcome interludes explore how Moore's career occasionally meshed well with family life, but more often kept him away from his wife and children. The section on how Moore met and romanced the woman he would marry is especially poignant and well-written, while some of the sections about pursuing criminals are less compelling because they contain too much barely relevant detail. When Moore steps back from spinning narratives about tracking specific criminals, he offers fascinating insights.
An unpretentious account of a proud career in service to public safety.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-914090-70-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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